LIONEL ABEL
217
our relationship to the good than one who can represent the Ought
which is not discoverable in all that it can be said Is? Cervantes's
hero has the quality of a goodness as evident as it is unprovable, and
of a goodness that is not confined to the aid which may be offered
one person by another. This knight errant has also set himself to ad–
dress wrongs in the social order to which he belongs, and in the
natural world as well . He is not only for right actions , those he is
ready to perform against all reason (which is to say when they are
not required); he is also for an order of things in which chivalrous ac–
tion is demanded, and not only for damsels in distress . Don Quixote
is also thinking of the earth, which men persist in torturing with
blunt-edged instruments. (What would he have said about the dis–
figurement of nature we tolerate today? Heidegger, perhaps speak–
ing for him, has remarked that we put a gun to nature and take its
wealth, to our own future impoverishment.) Let it be noted that Don
Quixote has notions about the morally good, the socially good, and
of what is good for the natural world .
Having chosen the Hidalgo as the paradigmatic figure of meta–
theater, I realize that I must explain why I preferred him to any
character of Pirandello , although the latter wrote most of the great
plays of our own or any time that can be called metatheatrical, and it
is to him we owe whatever understanding we have of the form. My
reason for not selecting a character from one of his plays is this :
Great as a playwright , Pirandello was not a great creator of char–
acter. Of all the characters who come on stage in
Six Characters in
Search ofan Author,
there is not one who is convincing as more than a
stage type . And in his other plays, many of them masterpieces of
construction , fulfilling Aristotle's requirement that plot be plausible
even if the characters are less so, there is no individual we can find
who is deeply touching or deeply true . To be sure, the protagonist of
Henry
IV
has been compared to Hamlet. But the comparison should
not have been made ; it will not help us understand either figure .
Granted that the hero of
Henry
IVhas
endured a tragic loss-twenty
of what might have been the best years of his life - yet his calculated
revenge, made possible by society's notion that he is mad, is surely
an unworthy deed. We cannot admire him for it, or pity him for hav–
ing as a consequence to remain in the asylum which has become his
home . And it is to be noted that the Father in
Six Characters ,
while
philosophically keen and eloquent in his contention that characters
